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Simple DIY Paper Flowers

Peter and I got a beautiful ironstone vase for our wedding, and I have been looking everywhere for some cute fake flowers to put in it. The ones I saw at the store just we’re what I’m looking for, so I decided to look for a little DIY flower project. I picked three paper flower tutorials from two very creative fellow bloggers and tried to recreate them. I love how all of them came out! Here are the results:

Kathy gives instructions for two different types of flowers, and I wanted to try both. They came out super cute, and took about 15-20 minutes per flower – not bad! Get ready to get messy, though. I ended up with glue everywhere. (Good thing I put down some newspaper on my table first!) Kathy gives great step-by-step instructions on her site, but here are some additional tips for success with these little beauties:

Ranunculus Flower #1: Get all of your materials prepped in advance. I cut out all my stamin squares and petals so they were ready to glue on. Once the glue came out, everything was covered in glue, and it would’ve been impossible to cut the delicate tissue paper after that. When you’re flower is complete, scrunch the petals a little with your hand. I think it gives them a nice texture.

Ranunculus Flower #2: Again, get everything prepped before you begin. I had two different sizes of plastic eggs, so I made one of each. I would recommend using a larger egg – the proportions seemed to be better so the flower looked fuller. The hardest part of this flower for me was attaching the stem. I was using stem wire (rather than a repurposed stem), so I used the floral tape to make little tabs to glue onto the egg (see below). I would highly recommend hot-gluing all of your floral tape in place regardless, though, because mine was slipping around.

Since I have a pretty big pitcher to fill, I thought a few of these full peony-like flowers would be a nice addition. I skipped the whole dyeing the coffee filters part (it seemed messier and more time consuming than I was interested in attempting), and instead used the tissue paper I already had for the first part of the project. I cut circles about 8″ in diameter, then shaped the edges like the tutorial explained. I also crinkled my paper up before attaching to the stem to mimic the look of the filters.

I wasn’t entirely clear how many filters/papers to use for each individual flower, so I did 3 of the darkest color, 4 of the medium and 6 of the lighter color. I probably could have done more and had fuller flowers, but I was still happy with the end result. These took me about 10-15 minutes for each flower.

For a fun afternoon project, I’m really pleased to now have colorful flowers for my pitcher!